I. Field
The following description relates generally to wireless communications, and more particularly to the use of channel state information reference signals in a wireless communication system.
II. Background
Wireless communication systems are widely deployed to provide various types of communication content such as voice, data, and so on. These systems may be multiple-access systems capable of supporting communication with multiple users by sharing the available system resources (e.g., bandwidth and transmit power). Examples of such multiple-access systems include code division multiple access (CDMA) systems, time division multiple access (TDMA) systems, frequency division multiple access (FDMA) systems, 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) systems, and orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) systems.
Generally, a wireless multiple-access communication system can simultaneously support communication for multiple wireless terminals. Each terminal communicates with one or more base stations via transmissions on the forward and the reverse links. The forward link (or downlink) refers to the communication link from the base stations to the terminals, and the reverse link (or uplink) refers to the communication link from the terminals to the base stations. This communication link may be established via a single-in-single-out, multiple-in-single-out or a multiple-in-multiple-out (MIMO) system.
A MIMO system employs multiple (NT) transmit antennas and multiple (NR) receive antennas for data transmission. A MIMO channel formed by the NT transmit and NR receive antennas may be decomposed into NS independent channels, which are also referred to as spatial channels, where NS≤min{NT, NR}. Each of the NS independent channels corresponds to a dimension. The MIMO system can provide improved performance (e.g., higher throughput and/or greater reliability) if the additional dimensionalities created by the multiple transmit and receive antennas are utilized.
In addition, a base station or terminal can transmit reference signals to maintain or improve performance of the wireless system. Reference signals are typically signals known a priori to a receiver. A receiving device may receive reference signals and based on the received reference signals may alter certain operational parameters or generate feedback to alter certain operational parameters of wireless communication. During the operation of a wireless system, the usefulness of references signals may diminish in the presence of interfering signals such as data or control signal transmissions from neighboring networks, or transmissions from different antennas of a transmitter. Furthermore, new reference signals may be transmitted using transmission resources in which legacy terminals may be expecting data transmissions.